Hang on Tight and Don't Look Down
by LadySilver
Summary: On her first full moon after season two, Erica comes to Scott for help. From the prompt: What happens when one werewolf loses his anchor and another can't find hers?
1. Chapter 1

_Author's Notes:  
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_1. This is for fountainxxpenny. Happy belated birthday, dear. Thanks for all your help and support over the last year._

_2. Big thanks to bethskink for helping make this story happen.  
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_3: Story fulfills angst bingo prompt: _violence_ and **TW:** contains __discussion of and references to sexual violence._**_  
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_4. Comments and constructive critique are always appreciated.  
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**Hang on Tight and Don't Look Down**

Scott catches the flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. Though his step falters, he keeps going, pulled by the lawnmower to the end of the row. The chore is turning out to be more challenging than he expected, and he's keeps catching himself looking for excuses to quit before it's done. With the impending full moon—and the damage he can feel it wreaking on his personality—he had hoped to do a couple of extra nice things for his mom to help her get through.

Before the bite, he hadn't been able to mow the lawn. Even loaded up on allergy medicine and with a filter mask over his face, the grass was too much for his asthma. The McCalls had been forced to hire a local kid with money they really couldn't afford to spend. The asthma was gone now, but not the physical problems. With a grimace of pain, Scott rubs his ears, fruitlessly trying to stave off a headache from a high pitched whine in the motor. He's going to get this task done, and no unexpected wavering in the shadows near his house is going to distract him.

A discrete sniff of the air reveals nothing. Between the powerful reek of newly mown grass and the bitter slice of diesel fumes that cut through it, all other smells are buried. He turns the lawnmower around and starts back the other direction, more alert to changes in the shadows around him than he had been, but otherwise giving no indication that he wasn't just caught up in a mind-numbing activity. The yard is more than half done, and he'd shed his shirt before the end of the first stripe. Now sweat is dripping down his chest and plastering his hair to his head, and he is seriously reconsidering whether the money being saved is worth it.

Another flicker of movement closer to the house makes him tighten his grip on the push bar, the metal denting under his fingers. The first flash could have been anything: a bird or squirrel or even a falling leaf. The second one is far more deliberate. Someone is trying to get his attention. Gritting his teeth, he finishes the row and gets the mower turned around again. Less than two steps into next row, he lets the mower pull to a stop and thumbs the button that shuts it off.

For a long moment he stands there, bits of grass strewn from the blades clinging to his bare legs and itching. With the engine noise gone, other sounds start to become audible. Among the susurration of traffic and the swishing of tree branches in the slight breeze of the day, he hears harsh, uneven breaths.

Abandoning the mower and the task, he stalks around to the front of the house, eager to confront his visitor. The ends of his fingers tingle with the start of his claws, restrained, but just barely.

Erica is standing on the front porch with one hip jutted against the support column. Her short shorts and tight t-shirt are filthy, stained and torn with dirt and streaks of blood, and her long blonde hair is ragged and strewn through with crushed leaves. She seems oblivious to her appearance, though, when she rests a hand on the railing and smirks: "Took you long enough."

Scott eyes her for a moment, then turns to peer around the yard, expecting to see Boyd and Isaac lurking. When he doesn't find them, he turns back. He has to admit that he's a little confused. "What do you want?"

Erica jerks her shoulder in a half-shrug, as if the answer should be obvious.

"I don't like you," Scott says. He can't remember the last time he was so blunt; normally, his feelings for a person have little impact on how he treats them. Not today.

"Then you don't know me. I've changed a lot as a person. I've grown a lot." She sticks her chest out as if displaying her breasts will emphasize her growth. Any effect she was hoping to achieve is lost beneath her dirt, and beneath their history.

"I didn't like you before," Scott counters. The announcement seems so final, like a judgment that can't be reversed, and Scott shifts his footing on the lawn in a useless attempt to hide his discomfort. It's strange that he even feels discomfort at the confession; he'd never thought the sentiment was a secret.

Now Erica laughs, a single huff of surprise. "Most days, I didn't like her either," she responds, quieter. "She's the only person I ever truly wanted to kill." She pauses and looks out at the horizon where the pale disc of a full moon is suspended, its threat obvious to both of them. "Except, today, I kinda want to kill everyone."

Scott closes his eyes and nods in understanding. The moon's pull thrums through his body, filling him with twitchy, volatile energy. He feels like he's one spark away from exploding. He hasn't felt like this since his second full moon and he'd forgotten just how badly he wants to grab that spark and go where the explosion takes him.

When Erica speaks again, her voice is tight and tiny as if she's hoping to squeeze the words past him before he can catch them. "I need your help."

Scott almost lets them go by as if he i_hadn't/i_ heard them. If it had been a little later in the day, he would have. As it is, Erica's timing was well chosen—or badly chosen, depending on your perspective. Scott sighs. "Why not go to Derek?" he asks. The question is perfunctory; he has a list of reasons he'd give with "I trust him as far as Stiles can throw him" right at the top. "He's your Alpha."

"He put me in a halo," Erica snips. She mimes the device around her head with her fingers as stand-ins for the spikes that drilled into her skull to hold the instrument in place. "He told me that I can handle more pain than the boys like it was some kind of joke to him. The next time I see a medieval torture device, it had better be a picture in a history book."

"And what makes you think I'll do anything different?" He closes the last few paces to the porch. From this vantage, he's looking up at Erica. Her smell is rank by human standards and nearly intolerable by werewolf ones, and it's obvious that she hasn't had more than a perfunctory bath in at least a week, a quick splash in the creek that runs through Beacon Hills Forest Preserve, if she was even able to do that. He does his best to ignore the smell, because after an afternoon in the hot sun, he's not much better off.

For the first time, Erica looks at him. _Really_ looks at him, as if she just not realized that he's actually _there_. Her eyes are hazel and wide, any makeup she'd been wearing long since worn away, and she looks vaguely surprised at either his presence or his question; he can't tell. "If anybody would know a different way, it would be you. You haven't made a secret about how much you dislike Derek or his methods. You've been on your own this whole time and so far you seem to be coping pretty well."

Scott twists his hands together, considering. "Not so good," he starts. He climbs the first step, the wooden boards of the deck creaking under his feet. Erica backs up to the porch swing, so Scott stops. "I had it all figured out; didn't change at all last full moon. But, now…" He shakes his head and makes a weak gesture toward the moon.

"What happened?" she asks, as if she actually cares.

Scott leans against the wooden post and stares up at what he can see of the blue afternoon sky, where the porch's overhand doesn't block it from view. It's a beautiful day, one he should be spending at the beach or the skate park when he's done doing his chores. One he should be spending with his girlfriend. "Allison broke up with me. S-she was my anchor." He doesn't volunteer how the last time Allison broke up with him, the shift had felt like the moon was rending his body the way her words had rent his heart.

"So it's like your first full moon all over again?"

Scott licks his lips, not sure how to explain. Nothing will ever be like his first moon; the shift was frightening and painful, but fast and buffered by his need to protect Allison. His second was where he experienced the truth. He'll never again be ignorant of what the moon can do to his body and his psyche, and that just makes the impending evening all the worse. "No," he finally explains. "I know how bad it's going to be."

"I don't know what mine is," Erica says. "My anchor. Isaac does. Boyd said he thinks he does. They made it look so easy."

"You'll figure it out," Scott answers.

"Kinda running out of time," Erica snaps back. She slumps into the porch swing, a defeated and scared sixteen year old girl. "Help me. Please."

Scott considers her, tries to consider what it cost her to come to him. It's hard to break through the shell of antipathy that's closing around him and, truth be told, he doesn't try very hard. Helping Erica, not helping her, either way doesn't matter to him—until he sees her touch a spot on her forehead where the spikes must have driven in, and it occurs to him that Erica coming to _him_ must have really pissed off Derek.

While Erica showers, Scott digs around in his room for a shirt and yoga pants that Allison had left over one time and he had never bothered to return. At first, he didn't want to. Then he developed a strange superstition that returning the items would really and truly mark the relationship over.

He leaves the clothes outside the bathroom door, explaining in low tones to Erica what he's doing. He knows she can hear, that there's no need to shout.

He lifts the clothes to his nose before he walks away and inhales deeply. They're still strong with Allison's scent. The smell curls through his body and centers him. It's not an anchor, but it's better than nothing. He feels bad for Erica, feels the urge to help her renewed. He does his best to cling on to that empathy. If he can't retain what it actually feels like, maybe he can retain the memory of feeling it. Maybe that will be enough to get them through.

After dropping off the clothes, he heads to the kitchen and starts digging around for food. He has no doubt that Erica hasn't been eating well, either. She's probably better off there since she can kill her own food, but even the werewolf physiology can't subsist on pure meat. He pours a couple glasses of orange juice, one of which he drains in one long gulp. Then he finds some bread that hasn't gone moldy and a band new bag of green grapes which he dumps into a colander to rinse off. He's running the water over the grapes when he hears his mother call his name.

"Scott?" she calls again. "Are you in the—" She steps into the kitchen with a stuffed laundry basket balanced on her hip and comes to a stop when she spots him. "You're not in the shower," she says. She glances at the ceiling, then back at him, her eyebrow raised. "Did you leave the water running outside?" The question sounds hopeful, like she already knows that the answer is negative and she has to ask anyway for her own well-being.

"It's Erica," he tells her. He shuts the tap off in the sink and gives the colander a shake to loose the excess water. "Erica Reyes," he adds, as if that will make everything OK. He knows his mother knows her and that connection seems like a good thing to exploit.

"Why is Erica showering in our house?" his mother asks. Her eyebrows crawl higher and her hands clench around the plastic handles of the laundry basket. She hasn't changed into her scrubs from the capris and t-shirt she'd put on that morning, yet her bearing is all commanding nurse.

"She needed to clean up," Scott answers simply. "Do we have anything else to eat? She's probably starved."

"Scott?" his mother says, ignoring the question. The warning in her tone clear. "Scott, I expect you to be more responsible than this. No matter what else you may be, you're still a kid and you're still living in my house and—"

On a different day, he might have interpreted her questions, her expression as concern: a mother worried over the choices her teenage son was making. He's standing in her kitchen half-clothed and sweaty, his hair is mussed, his face hot. He's admitted to a girl being in the shower. Any other day, he would have understood the miscommunication, would have turned his hands out and apologized until the mistake was cleared up. Today, all he sees is condemnation; the only thing that occurs to him that his mother is questioning his choices.

Scott snarls, his hackles up. "You're just jealous that I'm getting more action than you are!" he shouts, slamming the colander of grapes down into the sink harder than necessary. It isn't him, isn't something he would say. It also isn't true. Right now, he doesn't care. He wants to hurt her for daring to undermine him. Grapes escape from the colander and roll down the garbage disposal.

His mother's mouth drops open and she takes a step back; with a slight movement, she shifts the laundry basket between them. "Scott McCall," she utters, her voice pale under his verbal attack.

The fear in his mother's brown eyes slices through the pull of the full moon and yanks the tiny part that's still him back to the surface.

Scott takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. "I can't do this today, Mom," he says. "We're not…she's not." He huffs out another breath, his eyes cutting away for something neutral to focus on. It's the Christmas card photo from two years ago—still stuck to the refrigerator—that catches his attention. He barely recognizes the boy with bad skin who is posed with his brand new lacrosse gear in a studio shot that his mom still proudly shows visitors. "I'm not him," he finishes.

"That was nearly two years ago," his mother says as if she never would have thought otherwise.

"I mean—" He once more curls his fingers tight, using the slivers of pain of his nails cutting into his palm to buy more time. "—It's the full moon. I told you. I tried to tell you. I'm not myself. I can't _be _myself." He stumbles hard over his words, his apology. Speaking hadn't been this difficult when he'd tried to warn her a few days ago about what to expect. Then again, he doesn't remember the full moon hitting him so hard, so early. He wonders if Erica's presence is exacerbating the effects. And then he wonders if his mother will ever be able to understand how the vast majority of the moon's effects on him have no physical manifestation and thus are hard to explain.

His mother's lips form an O of understanding and her eyes drift to the ceiling. The water cuts off and they hear a thump of someone climbing out of the tub. A moment later, the hair dryer starts up. "Her, too?"

"Yeah," Scott answers. "She asked me to help her." He rakes a hand through his brown hair, the water that got on him from the sink slicking back his sweat-stiffened hair.

Without a word, Melissa disappears into the laundry room. When she reemerges a moment later, the basket is gone. "What can I do?" she asks. "You're going to need help getting ready now that there's two of you." She heads for the refrigerator and starts to pull dishes of leftovers out. She carries one of them over to the counter and dumps the contents onto the cutting board. As she starts slicing up the remains of a meatloaf from a couple nights before and making it into sandwiches, she warns, "Don't think you're getting off the hook. We are going to talk about this.

Scott nods silently wondering which "this," exactly, they're going to talk about. For all that he has been able to communicate to her, there's a great deal more that he hasn't—some of which she's not going to understand until she sees. A lot of which he never wants her to see. He stands awkwardly half way between the counter and door, not sure what to do with himself next. This is the part that Stiles would have helped him plan through, except Stiles is on vacation on the other side of the country, and no planning they had done was meant to accommodate two werewolves.

"I only want to make sure you're being safe," his mother adds a moment later. She turns to look at him, her posture carefully guarded, one foot balanced behind the other as if she's getting ready to bolt. She's still afraid of him. Right now, though, that's the smartest way she could be feeling.

"I know," Scott answers. He blinks, an idea clicking into place. He'd planned to stay home before, knowing that his mother would be at work and he could lock himself in the basement without fear of hurting or bothering her. With Erica in the mix, he wants to be as far away from the house and other people as possible. "We're going to go into the woods tonight. I won't be back until tomorrow.

For a second, he thinks she's about to remind him of his curfew. Her gaze sweeps over him and the tip of her tongue peeks out as she gets ready to admonish him. Then she turns back to the counter and starts stuffing the sandwiches into plastic baggies. "Get the blanket off my bed and let me throw it in the wash," she says. "You'll need something to keep you warm once the sun goes down."

With this direction to guide him, Scott heads for the stairs. First the blanket, then the chains. They're going to go into the forest, but they're not going to run free. No matter how much the urge to kill itches inside him, he's still determined to make it through this moon without satiating it. This moon, and all the rest.


	2. Chapter 2

Scott and Erica head into the woods well before the sun begins to set. This late in the spring, daytime stretches on for hours after dinner and night comes on slowly. That makes it hard to judge the danger level of the moon through visual clues, leaving him with only the much more sensitive, and much less practiced, internal pull on his psyche as the guide.

Erica paces through the house the whole time they're waiting to leave, sitting restlessly first on one piece of furniture, then another. She eventually turns on the television—the volume muted—then proceeds to change the channel so often that he feels like he's watching a MadLibs. In frustration, Scott stomps up to his room where he waits until his mother leaves for work and until Stiles texts him a reminder to be safe.

The two young werewolves walk in silence, their feet crunching over the fallen leaves and twigs. Now that Erica has gotten Scott's agreement to help, she doesn't seem to have anything else to say to him. And he's not in the mood to talk. His normal, affable nature is gone, with its memory still close enough that he can miss its loss.

The woods are alive with the hooting of owls and the chirring of insects coming awake for the night. Scott can hear mice scurrying through the underbrush and squirrels scrabbling in the trees as they race from one branch to the next. The must of mold and decay wafts up heavily from the ground while the sharp scent of chlorophyll presses down from the leafy canopy. Each sound, each smell picks at his nerves and makes him feel like he should just start ripping and slashing until he can destroy it all.

In the mix, he picks up scents from dozens of different types of flowers and trees, feces from the wildlife, and blood from a raccoon that had been killed. The last makes his gums ache. His canines haven't come forth, and they aren't going to, but he can feel them wanting to. The imagined taste of blood quickens a suppressed instinct to tear and kill and he feels himself hunker closer to the ground as if to pursue prey.

He notices that Erica has her hands clenched by her sides, her teeth grit in the same fight.

Scott forces himself upright and picks up his pace. The duffle bag on his shoulder bounces and clanks with every step. If he were still human, he'd have a massive bruise on his shoulder and hip from its weight. Of course, if he were still human, he would never be carrying a bag of chains into the forest at night. Erica has a different bag packed with sandwiches and fruit that neither of them plan to eat. If they ate anything that night, it would be an animal that wandered too close to their campsite. Still, his mom insisted and it was easier to agree than to fight.

Eventually, they reach a patch of woods away from the road and off the main trails where the trees are older and sturdier; the tree tops rise high into the sky and are greener from all the sunlight they're able to keep. Because of the tall trees, the undergrowth isn't as thick as elsewhere. The ground is dry and the sounds of traffic are a strain for even his ears to pick up. This feels like the safest place they're going to be able to find on short notice.

He drops the duffle bag next to the oldest tree and rubs his eyes, a sudden tiredness conflicting with the energy that the moon is pouring into him. "We'll do it here," he says.

Erica peers around and then up into the trees. "Are you sure it's safe?" she asks. With the bag on her shoulder, she looks like she used to look when she was a shy, badly dressed girl who skulked around school and was afraid of everything. Her hazel eyes are wide and sad, bereft of all the confidence she had gained.

Scott's laugh is a dry sound that carries no humor. "Probably not," he says. He thinks of Derek and Isaac and Boyd who are out there somewhere, maybe in these same woods and how, no matter how all of the werewolves act the rest of the time, during the full moon their baser instincts will be at play. And he thinks of Chris Argent and the rest of the Hunters. Though Argent won't be prowling the woods tonight, any of his buddies could easily be looking kill one of the notorious Beacon Hills werewolves. No, he thinks, his and Erica'ssafety is not guaranteed. Being werewolves meant that any assumption of safety was beyond naïve.

Erica cocks her head like she's listening hard, her eyes narrowing. Slowly her expression shapes itself to back into the visage that she adopted after her bite. Her tongue darts over her lips and she plants a fist on her jutted hip. "Honestly," she says, her tone one of studied disappointment, "I thought you'd have a place for this, like a storage locker or a private shed or something." Her gaze hardens as she adds, "I thought you'd be better at this."

"If you don't like how I'm doing things, you're welcome to go back to Derek. I'm sure he'll be happy to see you," Scott shoots back.

The little thrill Scott feels at seeing Erica pale brings new urgency to his preparations. "We're going to do things my way, not his," Scott tells her, even though he can't promise that his way will work any better. He can't promise that his way will work. His way has to be better than Derek's, though.

He flashes on the torture chamber from which he'd rescued Derek not so many months ago, and shudders. Derek made the whole "control yourself" thing sound so easy, and yet his family had kept a specially prepared basement with chains and cages like they knew that anchors sometimes broke free of their lines, or that discovering one's anchor wasn't so easy to do on command and under threat. Not that he'd bothered to mention any of this to the teens before he turned them.

Unzipping the bag—the loud clicking of metal on metal setting his teeth on edge—he pulls out a length of chain. He hears Erica's heart skip a beat, can smell her panic fresh in the air. "It's just to restrain us," he tells her, holding it out for her to take and examine if she wants. She eyes the thick metal links but makes no move to touch them. "I don't have anything that's meant to hurt. We're going to stick to regular chains and handcuffs."

Erica's lips spread in a sultry smile as she takes the statement and twists its context. "Chains and handcuffs? Sounds kinky." Despite her effort, the innuendo sounds perfunctory.

Still, she has a point.

Scott rolls his head back and closes his eyes briefly while attempting to reclaim that moment of humanity he'd put away earlier. He doesn't want to mess this up; it's too important.

"Erica," he says. "What if it is?" The possibility had hit him while he'd been gathering the chains. During his second transformation, the only person around him was Stiles and he'd never had sexual thoughts about Stiles. During his third, Allison had been there, but he'd been so wrapped up in not hurting her and her not seeing how bad it really was for him that, again, he'd had no thoughts of anything _else _happening.

"What if what is?" she asks, now looking very confused and slightly uncomfortable, as if she hadn't expected her attempt at sex appeal to backfire. She wipes her hands on the sides of her pants, then crosses her arms over her chest, hiding her ample breasts behind them in a very self-conscious move. The effect would have been better if the gesture didn't increase the visible cleavage, Scott thinks. The shirt she is wearing was Allison's and Allison was not a chesty woman. On Allison, it was a fitted-shirt. On Erica, it served more to display than conceal.

Scott feels the heat rise in face and his tongue tie. So that he doesn't have to look at Erica, he pulls all the chains out of the bag and lays them out on the ground, untangling them like Christmas tree lights. "What if we do have sex?" he asks. He can barely force the words out. If Erica didn't have werewolf hearing, she would have missed them completely in the rustle of the leaves.

She regards him for a second, then rolls her eyes dramatically as if she has no time for his nonsense. "Really, Scott? Don't you think we're going to be a little _occupied?_" Her dismissal doesn't disguise the bitter scent of worry he picks up from her.

"Once we change, I'm not going to be in control, Erica," he says. "Neither are you. Don't you remember how it feels? What we're capable of?" He hefts one of the chains and rattles it. "I bought these at a Home Depot. There's no one here to help chain us up and there's no way to know if the chains are going to hold. They're meant for trucks, not werewolves. Even if they do hold, we're still going to be close together. Who knows what can happen? Maybe nothing." He tries to shrug, but the truth is he is concerned and the shrug dies as little more than a twitch.

Erica's glaring at him by the time he finishes. "You don't think I know what it's like to shift? What the dangers are? The only reason I'm here is because I didn't want to do it alone. I didn't become a werewolf to _keep being alone._" With that, she stomps off into the woods and soon disappears among the trees. Scott can still hear her breathing, can hear her kicking one of the trees, the thin canvas of the shoes she's wearing scraping against the bark with each impact.

Scott selects the heaviest chain and starts wrapping it around the base of the tree. The mere thought of having sex with Erica feels like a betrayal to Allison, despite the fact that they are officially broken up. Which doesn't meant it won't happen. He wonders how he and Erica had had hours together to prepare and neither of them had thought about what could happen when two animals with the kinds of urges that transformed werewolves had were placed in close proximity.

To deter himself from thinking about it further or from listening to Erica maul the tree, he focuses on the preparations.

From the other bag, he pulls out a blanket that his mom insisted they take. "I will not have you sitting on the dirty ground all night," she had informed them when she brought it in from the laundry room. She's trying too hard to sell the need for the blanket; there's a desperation to her pitch as she adds: "You'll ruin your clothes." The blanket had still been warm from the dryer and smelling like fabric softener when she shoved it in the bag. Scott doubts that she understood the likelihood of their clothes getting ruined with blood and self-inflicted tears, then decides that this, too, is merely an effort on her part to cope with what is happening. He spreads the micro-fiber blanket at the base of the tree, folding it in half to make it thicker. Despite the effort, the beige spread of cloth seems to do little more than outline all the rocks and bumps that are underneath.

He's attempting to smooth out the worst of the lumps when he hears Erica stomping back. He looks up in time to see her grab the hem of her shirt with both hands and yank it over her head. The tight cloth stretches and gets caught on her chin, and then in her hair. It comes free with the tearing of stiches and leaves Erica's blonde hair mussed. Then she's standing before him in her white bra, which she unclasps with only a daring smirk to forecast her intention. "Why wait?" she says. "If it's going to happen anyway..."

The cups fall away, dangling from her shoulders by their straps. Her naked breasts are left on display. Even at their size, they were well-formed and shapely, their areolae dark against her creamy white skin. They are also all wrong. Once, Scott would have found breasts like hers to be a turn on. Now all they do is remind him of how the girl before him isn't Allison.

She reads this in him, her jaw setting in a furious line. "You don't think I'm hot?" she challenges.

He considers the pile of restraints and begins sorting through the options for the pieces they'll need: shackles for their feet, manacles for their hands. He's brought nothing to quell their yelling, nothing meant to deliberately cause them pain. While pain could be used to forestall or undo a transformation, it still hurt. Going in was bad enough; he didn't want to have more pain in order to come out.

Erica is still standing in front of him, naked-chested and waiting for an answer. Scott blinks slowly. His normal urge to smooth the situation over, to try to fix any hurt feelings he's caused, is gone. "You're not my type," he reminds her. "Also, I still don't like you."

Erica stalks over to the blanket. Her breasts sway with each hard step. She pitches the shirt onto the blanket first, then drops herself down with a loud "hmph." All of her previous sultriness and "come and get me" has been thoroughly dispensed with.

Scott continues to sort through the chains and test each piece.

"How about now?" she demands after a few moments of watching him. An upward tilt of her chin challenges him to dismiss her again. Her body is on display less than a foot from Scott. She slips her hands under her breasts and hefts them, trailing a thumb over each nipple as if she heard somewhere that boys can't resist that.

Scott presses his lips together and rocks back into a crouch. As much as he should be eager at the offer of sex from a girl who qualifies as hot by nearly every metric (except his own), his body is not on board. He can smell the soap she had washed her body with—his mother's—and the lingering scent of Allison from the shirt and the shampoo that he used. Underneath that, he smells werewolf.

A new set of instincts come to the fore and he growls. His eyes light up in preparation to attack, to defend his territory from the encroacher before him. This werewolf is not his pack, not his responsibility. He _knows _that what she's doing is meant to lower his defenses so that she can attack.

Digging his claws into his thighs, he reins himself back in. With effort, he is able to remind himself that the person before him is neither a stranger nor an antagonist. It's only his full moon paranoia that says otherwise.

Selecting one of the shackles, he tosses it at Erica. It thumps heavily onto the blanket next to her leg. "Put this on." He runs the chain through the provided rings on the other set and slips the shackles around his ankles, tightening them into place as hard as he can stand it. So what if the blood flow gets cut off. He'll heal. "And put your shirt back on. This isn't—" He shakes his head , the sentiment he wants fleeing before he can capture it in words. They're running out of time.

With a shrug, she rehooks her bra and pulls the shirt back over her head. More seams rip. Allison isn't going to recognize the shirt if she ever gets it back. "Everyone always tells me it's my choice," Erica comments, "and it never really is, is it?"

"All I did was ask a question, Erica," Scott says. The voice that comes out of his mouth has deeper overtones than usual; he smirks internally at the promise of power that this marks. "I've never shifted with another person before. Who knows what could happen?" The smirk worms its way to his lips and he contemplates how easy it would be to shove all the chains away and just _enjoy _himself. That his question had originally been asked out of worry is irrelevant now.

"Do you really think you could hurt me if I didn't want you to?" Erica returns. Her voice has also picked up a darker timbre. She leans forward on her hands, putting her face right up next to Scott's. Her breath gusts hot on his face. "You may have been a werewolf longer, but _I _paid attention during training." She sniffs, a condescending gesture and backs away on her knees. She's moving, not retreating, as her posture makes clear.

Picking up the shackle, she turns it over in her hands, examining it, contemplating it. At last, she slips her thin ankle into the curved metal and closes it. "What's next?"

Scott has to shake himself back into action. Only the months of practice he's already had at resisting the preternatural urges make it possible for him to continue.

He runs the length of chain through shackles, then pulls it tight around the base of the tree, pulling them together. The two werewolves are now attached to each other, attached to the tree, and unable to move more than a few inches in any direction until the chains came off. He tests them with a gentle tug of his foot, shifting his position into the least uncomfortable way to sit that he can create after the fact.

"Derek told me that our anchor is something that connects us to our human selves. Something that makes us feel human?" Erica says. She selects a set of manacles from the pile and holds them out for Scott to run a second chain through before she secures them around her wrists.

Scott nods to confirm her understanding. He's starting to get sweaty, his breathing to come a little heavier, though it's not from physical exertion.

"I don't want to feel human," Erica confesses. She's also breathing more rapidly and every few seconds she squeezes her eyes shut and bites her lip. "I hated every part of how it felt when I was human. Anyone who didn't hate me ignored me. Sometimes people managed to do both."

"Yeah, that sounds like it sucked," Scott answers. It doesn't really, and his tone no doubt betrays that. The Erica he remembers was a recluse who hid in the back of the classroom and answered teachers' questions with shrugs. She was overly defensive when other kids did try to talk to her and totally unable to take a joke. As far as he can tell, any problems she had were her fault.

"You want to know what sucked?" she asks him with a bitter laugh. She doesn't give him a chance to answer. "I couldn't even get away from it when I went home. The way my mother would look at me…like I was some massive disappointment. The biggest failure of _her _life. All because sometimes my brain would freak out and make me start convulsing and drooling and shitting in public. I always thought that she'd just 'forget_' _to pick me up from the hospital one day and then she'd go off and start a new life where she could pretend she'd never had a daughter." She falls silent after that burst. Her head drops forward, blonde hair spilling across her face and down her chest. She plants her hands flat on the blanket and leans into them. She doesn't cry.


	3. Chapter 3

Summoning the last of his will, Scott finishes getting the chains all threaded and secured. He leaves the two of them with enough give that their hands and feet won't fall asleep, but hopefully not so much that they'll be able to leverage themselves free. As he suspected, the blanket provides little protection from the rocks on the ground.

Tonight's transformation is already shaping up to be the worst that Scott has experienced, and that's not counting what the moon will do.

"Wasn't there anything good?" he asks, at last. It's an effort to remember that they were talking, much less what they were talking about. He tugs the threads of his memory until the pattern realigns. Human thoughts. That was it. "A-a birthday party or your dad or something you did before you got sick?"

Erica shakes her head 'no' at each suggestion. "I tried everything."

Scott considers for a moment. Allison had been his anchor before he knew he needed one. The stability and connection she provided hadn't been a choice; she'd been an absolute. His love for her wasn't the anchor, though he had no idea what it was. What he did know is that when they were broken up, he was adrift.

The area under the trees was starting to dim, sunset affecting it sooner than could be seen in the patches of blue sky that peep through the branches. He can feel the air starting to cool, raising goosebumps on his bare arms.

The moon's pull is growing stronger, and Scott keeps catching himself sullenly glaring out into the woods. Low-level anger simmers beneath every breath. The clanking of chains irritates him, the rustling of small animals that he can't reach annoys him. His body itches with the need to _run_ and pinpricks dance through his legs urging him to move.

Next to him, Erica wriggles in her own frustration. She presses close to him, grinding their shoulders together. The warmth of her skin combats the night breeze that has sprung up and Scott groans, his desire to pull away from any kind of touch impeded, which strains his already tight patience. His skin has become so sensitive that the he hisses at the slight friction of cotton cloth over the hairs on his arm.

"It's getting closer," Erica states, naming the obvious. Her words have an excitement underpinning them that Scott will never be able to understand. In the back of his mind, a thought bubbles that the reason she can't find her anchor is because she doesn't really want one. That's not something he can understand, today or any other day, so he doesn't try.

Cricket song starts as if the insects had been given the downbeat. Their chirring fills the forest, save for the area immediately surrounding Scott and Erica, which falls completely silent. Only the werewolves', as yet intermittent, grunts and groans of pain intrude on the silence.

Then the hormones that had been absent just a short time ago flare up, engulfing Scott's body with a surge of arousal. He buckles over suddenly, painfully hard. Next to him, Erica moans and presses her hands across her crotch. The reek of lust and desire fills the air and Scott's mouth falls over in a breathless pant, his eyes rolling back in his head.

The crickets pause at the noise for a long moment before resuming their own mating song.

Scott starts to grab for Erica. The desire to push her down and cover her overwhelms any sense of appropriateness or consideration. He hopes she'll fight, that the claws he sees growing on the tips of her fingers will be put to good use. The thought of them raking into his flesh excites him and his vision burns bright. He sees the yellow of his pupils matched in hers. Her tongue dips over her elongated canines like a promise.

Then the moon hits its peak. Both their bodies arch back at the force as the shift rips through them from the inside out. The lust expands and erupts through rage and a desperation that demands to be lashed out against. The yelling that fills that night is disembodied. He knows the noise if his, is hers, and yet it sounds like it's coming from outside them, like it's part of the moon's power.

In the darkness, he sees Erica. She's bent forward, balanced on her hands and knees, panting. Her eyes are alight with yellow fire, and he can't believe that he ever tried to resist.

When Scott wakes up, he's lying on his side, limbs contorted by the chains that still secure him to the tree. His arms are stretched over his head and his body is bent backwards at the waist. Every muscle aches like the morning after the hardest lacrosse practices. He smiles, tentative yet hopeful.

It's morning. The sunrise is still pink, shining down into the forest with a softening glow that blurs all the leaves together. Dew covers the ground in tiny droplets. He feels chilled and slightly damp from its moisture, yet grateful for it.

A groan comes from next to him and a weight he hadn't recognized lifts from his legs. That's when he realizes that he and Erica were as entangled as their bonds allowed. She had been sleeping draped across him.

They pull themselves into sitting positions, their movements slow and careful like they've aged fifty years in one night. As Scott moves, his arms start to tingle painfully from being held stretched over his head for so long; the muscles of his shoulder blades cramp. He hisses and rotates his shoulders up and down for a long minute until the cramp starts to ease.

"Are you OK?" he asks.

"Never been better," Erica responds. There's only a trace of sarcasm in her words. She combs her fingers through the ends of her tangled blonde hair, for all the good it does.

One of his manacles is bent, the metal stretched enough that his hand easily pulls free. He uses that hand to untwist himself as best as he can. His shoulder pops loudly.

With a small sigh and a wry roll of his head, he asks, "Still think this was better than Derek's way?"

Erica's lips curl into a pout and she considers the question while massaging the juncture of her neck and shoulder. "It wasn't worse," she concedes. "I could learn to live with this. If I had to."

If she doesn't find an anchor—and if he doesn't find a new one—they're going to have to, Scott thinks. He's still a little disoriented from the after effects of the full moon and a rough night sleeping on the ground, but he still knows that that's not a future he wants to look forward to.

Erica's sitting closer to where he left the bags, though reaching them still requires dexterity and good control of her feet. At last, she's able to stretch far enough to manipulate the bag into reach with a triumphant "ha!"

Fishing the keys out of the bag, she starts to unlock them. The chains fall away like a guilty conscience being eased. As soon as they're off, Scott kicks shoves out of the way and collapses back onto the blanket. He's staring up into the spread of branches and the pink morning light that's shining through them bringing the promise of a hot day. On the breeze, he can smell rain building.

He's woken up to mornings like this before when he was younger and he'd go camping sometimes with his parents or Stiles. He swallows back the melancholy that's rising at how different things have become.

"I liked who I was before," he says, picking up the thread of conversation from the previous night. It's strange to try to recreate what he was thinking and what they were talking about with the perceptions that he has on this side of the full moon. The sensation is like stepping into another person's conversation and shouldering him aside. He resists the urge to apologize to the person he pushed out of the way—which, he supposes, is himself. Only, not. "I had most of the things I wanted and the things I didn't have yet, getting them was just a matter of time."

"You were a nobody," Erica says. She's massaging her wrists now, first one, then the other. Any marks the manacles left on her skin have healed, yet he knows that the sensation of being chained takes longer to fade.

"No I wasn't."

Erica cocks her head as if he's said something that doesn't make sense.

Scott shrugs, which sends twinges through his beleaguered shoulders, and tries to explain. "I had friends. My mom. I was already on the lacrosse team—even if I never got off the bench. I had Stiles. Life was pretty good."

He gestures down at his clothes which are a shredded mess. His t-shirt has claw marks running the length and one sleeve is missing entirely. He can feel the morning breeze slithering through rents in the fabric and coasting over skin that should be covered. A hard shiver runs through him. "Now I have this, too."

Erica's clothes are in worse shape. Her shirt gapes open on one side like someone tried to rip it from her body, exposing her bra. Claw tears have shredded the yoga pants.

"It's a small price to pay," she counters. She inspects the largest of tears in what remains of her shirt, and dismisses it with a flick of her fingers. She's quieter, like she's mostly speaking to herself, when she adds, "At least now when my body is going to freak out on me, it's not a surprise."

It clicks, then. How Erica can rejoice in being a werewolf and still have such terror of the full moon. She'd gained control over her body and life except for the one day a month when she lost it, arguably worse than before. Her attitude was a paradox. Making sense of it helps him understand how he can enjoy the violence of lacrosse and the power that his supernatural abilities give him on the field when he fears that same power, that same violence every other second of his life. He still thinks the cost was too high for himself, but maybe it's not as—he glances up through the trees at the faint disk of the moon that still hangs in the sky—astronomical as it was.

The buzzing of his phone interrupts Scott before he tries to put his revelation into words, which is good because he realizes that he probably wouldn't have been able to. The phone buzzes again, insistent on getting his attention.

"Aren't you going to see who that is?" Erica asks.

He's tempted to say 'no.' He has no idea what time it is, but he knows it's early—too early for someone to be calling him. In his next thought, it occurs to him that someone could be calling for reasons other than to socialize. Isaac could have lost his anchor, or chosen not to use it. Boyd could have been wrong about finding his. Peter could have gone out killing just because. All of Scott's effort at keeping Erica and himself safe could have been for nothing because of all the people he hadn't been paying attention to.

With a sigh, Scott rolls toward the bag and retrieves his phone. The smell of the sandwiches makes his stomach rumble loudly and he's tempted to eat them anyway despite them having sat out all night in the summer heat. Surely his werewolf healing will prevent food poisoning. Then he sees who the message is from and blanches. He reads it out loud.

"Be there in fifteen minutes," his mom wrote. "Get presentable."

His eyes widen as he parses what she means and casts another look at the ruined state of his and Erica's clothing. "I'm dead," he says. "She's going to kill me."

"Why?" Erica peers over his shoulder to read the message for herself. "Nothing happened."

Scott hesitates. His memory of what happened after the change is scattered. It's obvious that something occurred between him and Erica, though _what _he doesn't know. He sniffs, consciously searching for a clue to ease—or confirm—the worry nagging at him. There's blood in the air, more than what the stains on their clothes would suggest. That doesn't surprise him. Between the friction from the restraints and the wounds they inflicted on each other, he expected stains on the blanket or more devastation to their clothes, and there isn't.

"Scott," Erica repeats, breaking into his thoughts. "Nothing happened." She scoots next to him so that their knees are touching and takes his hands in hers in a gesture so un-Erica-like that Scott boggles. "We fought."

Despite her assurance, alarm jangles through him. The amorality of his transformed state is his second biggest, second most constant worry. His whole body tenses in preparation for receiving confirmation of a new level of monstrosity.

Then Erica grins. Her teeth are white and even, and there's vindication in her smile, a secret accomplishment that she's been itching to share. Her breath also stinks, which he ignores because he knows his is no better. "I won. I told you you couldn't hurt me."

The scent he is searching for is absent. Its absence is almost as big a relief as when he found out that he didn't kill the bus driver. As close as he had come to needing to redefine how he sees himself, and he had once again managed to step back from the edge rather than toppling over it.

"Nothing?" he asks.

Erica catches his face between her hands and forces him to look at her. Her hazel eyes bore into his brown with studied seriousness. "Nothing that you're _ever_ going to be able to live down," she says. She pats his cheek and lets go.

Scott's left stunned from the emotional whiplash of Erica's response. While he's glad that, even wolfed out, he was able to stay in control of the important urges, he's not sure how to take Erica's glee at besting him. If they were going to be in competition, it would have been nice if he'd known.

Mechanically, he starts cleaning up the chains, getting them wound up and put away. They're heavier on this side of the full moon with the weight of memory on them and he's reluctant to touch them more than necessary.

Erica tsks as she hands over the bent manacle. "You should've tried harder, Scott. Maybe next time, we'll find out what you can really do in a fight."

Scott shoves it into the bottom of the bag and tries to shove it out of his mind.

The evidence that he can clean up is dispensed with just in time.

Scott smells his mother before he sees her. More precisely, he smells the breakfast she's brought for them. There's McDonald's breakfast burritos and egg sandwiches, orange juice, and hash browns, and his mouth is watering by the time his mother steps through the trees. She's still dressed in her scrubs and she looks tired, dark circles under her eyes, her hair beginning to fall out of the pony tail she ties it in for work, but she's carrying the bags in one hand and a drink tray in the other with three cups in it.

"What the hell happened to your clothes?" she demands, as soon as she sees them. Her brown eyes go wide and the tiredness vanishes under the shock of what she's seeing. Scott's just happy that he was able to get all the chains put away; when the time comes for her to see him chained up, he wants to present it carefully. If she'd walked in on that, too…

"Hi, Mrs. McCall," Erica says. She waves and pulls herself to her feet with another groan. "Is that breakfast? I'm starved."

"We fought," Scott says, scratching his head in embarrassment. "It looks a lot worse than it was. Right?"

"Probably," Erica replies dismissively. Her attention is on the food. She beelines to his mom and relieves her of one of the bags and the drinks tray, which she then carries back to the blanket. She throws herself down and tears into the bag.

"Your clothes," Melissa repeats. "They're ruined. Is this…normal?" She's peering around at the makeshift campsite now, scanning with eyes that are trained to look for hard-to-see symptoms. Her gaze keeps landing back on Scott and then bouncing off, as if she's not quite able to accept what she sees.

Scott shrugs, because there hasn't been a normal anything since he got bitten, and at least his mom is trying to look at him. Eventually, he hopes, they'll be able to renegotiate their relationship. "I'll pay for new ones," he answers. The offer is really the only peace offering he's able to make. "I'm sure Dr. Deaton will give me a few extra hours if I ask."

"You're not hurt, are you?" Melissa asks. She steps closer. The bags in her hands are dangling limply and Scott fears that she's doing to drop them. "Erica, are you hurt?"

Erica mumbles a negative through a mouthful of hash browns, then swallows and clarifies, her tone flippant, "We're fine. We're all healed and there's a whole month until the next full moon." More seriously, she says, "By the way, thanks for the food. You have no idea how hungry full moon night makes me."

At that, Melissa holds out the second bag to Scott. He accepts it at the same time that his stomach makes a loud rumble. "You want to sit down?" he asks, gesturing back to the blanket. "We're all ourselves now. The worst is over." _Relatively speaking_, he thinks, but doesn't say, though he's sure that his expression says it for him.

Melissa nods and follows him to the blanket. She pulls a coffee out of the drink tray and sips it while she witnesses how quickly two werewolves can eat breakfast. "Is this what it's like every month?" she asks after the food is gone and the two teens have settled back to muster up the energy for their next move. The day after is all about recovering.

Without thinking about it, Scott has seated himself with his thigh touching Erica's. Through the rips in their clothes, their bare skin comes in contact. It's not as awkward as it should be.

The dew lifts away and the first wave of morning bird song ceases. Melissa collects the garbage, crumpling it up and shoving it under one leg so it doesn't blow away. Her coffee is gone, though she keeps sipping on the empty cup. The caffeine hasn't helped; her eyes have grown heavier and she looks ready to curl up on the blanket and sleep right there. "Are you ready to go?" she asks, climbing to her feet, a hand pressed to her lower back.

"Definitely," Scott answers. He catches Erica's uncertain look, the way she bites her lip for a second before throwing back her shoulders, as if donning attitude will solve all the real problems.

His mother must have caught it, too, because, without missing a beat, she says, "We'll throw some sheets on the extra bed and I'm sure I can round up some clothes that wouldn't make a seamstress despair. And you, young man—" She points a finger at Scott who automatically flinches back. "—There's a lawn mower sitting in the middle of our yard. I assume you'll take care of that?"

Scott's face flushes. "Yes, Mom," he answers. "I'm sorry, I—"

Melissa cuts him off with a wave of her hand. "I've heard a lot of excuses in my time for people avoiding their chores. Yours is one I'll actually accept." She smoothes her shirt and ticks her head back the way she came in. "Finish the job after you get some rest?"

With a grateful nod, Scott stands up. Erica helps him shake out and fold the blanket, then gather the duffle bags.

The hike to his mother's car is quicker than the hike out had been. Because of the state of their clothes, they have to be more diligent about early morning joggers and early-rising campers. The bag thumps against Scott's hip, reminding him of the bruise it tried to leave the previous night. Today the banging hurts, but it doesn't upset him.

Erica sidles over and bumps him. "Gotta admit, Scott. It wasn't so bad hanging out with you. I'd do it again."

He hopes they won't have to. Every full moon is tempting fate. If they don't find anchors soon, they'll tempt it too far and they'll find out what violence they really are capable of. Since now doesn't seem the time to say this, he settles for a nudge back and a "Yeah, me too."

END


End file.
